Common Sense Takes a Holiday...

We're awaiting the birth of our first grandchild. Sometime today or tomorrow.

I'm sitting at an establishment on Big Lake Detroit right now, with an order of chips and salsa and a diet coke, my motorcycle helmet and backpack and laptop in tow...and pondering a few things.

Along with many other Americans who can afford the luxury of a tank of gas, Common Sense has taken a holiday.

I went and got the propane tank filled this morning, and stopped at the little butcher shop next to the propane store... After picking out a package of beef sticks, I struck up a conversation with the proprietor of the butcher shop, who, incidentally, keeps a close eye on the commodities markets, especially corn. According to the guy, due to the flooding in key corn growing areas of Iowa and elsewhere in the midwest, the price of corn per is supposed to skyrocket to nearly $18 dollars a bushel in the fall. This, he said, will necessarily send the price of beef skyrocketing, as well. This will also hurt many local farmers, who are already contracted to sell their corn at only $6 per bushel. Look for the price of beef, pork, milk and other staple food items to climb through the stratosphere as well as a result.

The big winner in this? Archer Daniels Midland, who still has contracts for the remaining scarce amounts of corn and soybeans to produce ethanol and biodiesel, which will of course decrease the supply and drive up prices even more.

And do you know what the big kicker in all this is? We, the consumers/taxpayers are taking it up the keester in spades. For example, do you know that there's a plant in southern Minnesota run by ADM? And do you know what they manufacture? Biodiesel. That's right. One of the supposed saviors of our futures and the supposed end-all and be-all hedge against our dependence on foreign oil. And for every gallon of biodiesel that ADM produces in southern Minnesota, we, the taxpayers, kick in a dollar.

Now, one might say, what's the big deal? After all, that biodiesel just goes to pumps in Minnesota, and helps ease the price of diesel at the pumps, right?

Wrong again, grasshopper. The biodiesel produced by ADM in plants in southern Minnesota takes a detour at Mankato and heads off to--EUROPE. Yep, we, the taxpayers, are paying Archer Daniels Midland one dollar for every gallon of biodiesel they produce, and we then watch that gallon make a beeline out of Minnesota to the cozy confines of Western Europe. That same biodiesel that is in part serving to dwindle our food supplies, and driving up the price of food that Americans must buy.

Fellow Minnesotans, fellow Americans, we are being raped and robbed at the behest of the politicians, who are beholden to corporate farms, as they and their beneficiaries of their largesse in the State and Federal legislatures wink like pirates.

And the ruse continues...as do the ruses that involve supposed man-made global warming, supposed climate catastrophes, and other manufactured crises leading the politicians and their robber-baron accomplices running around like Chicken Little, while real economic crises that have their origins in these very scams they perpetrate fester under their slimy feet.

And all I can do is look at the prospect of my grandchild coming into the world... and shudder.

Common Sense has taken a vacation, and its return is nowhere on the horizon.

I weep for our nation.